Ashley Montagu, born Israel Ehrenberg in East London in 1905, was one
of those rare men of learning who succeeded in making substantive
scholarly contributions to their academic disciplines while at the same
time maintaining contact with the educated layman, indeed contributing
substantively to the latter's learning. In addition, he was a dedicated
and articulate social critic, concerned with bringing the findings of
the social and biological sciences to bear upon the betterment of man's
lot, while subjecting some of those very findings to critical social
scrutiny. His accomplishments in these three domains, the scientific,
the public-educational, and the socioethical, will be treated as a
unity in what follows, in accordance with what was clearly the spirit
of the program that guided his life's work.

Although Montagu's contributions span a variety of fields in the social
and biological sciences -- including work on problems as diverse as
Australian aborigines' concepts of sexuality and reproduction, the
measurement of internal anatomical landmarks on the heads of intact
living human beings, adolescent infertility in girls, the role of
cooperative behavior in evolution, and the biological and cultural
factors in aggression and in sex roles -- his principal legacy will
indisputably consist of his critical analysis of the concept of race.

The problem of race preoccupied Montagu from the beginning of his
intellectual career (Montagu 1925; 1926), more than a quarter century
before the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483), which heralded the civil
rights activism that has since followed in America. Montagu's work
played a role in that Supreme Court decision, as well as in shaping the
social consciousness that ushered it in and has attended it ever
since. If some of his ideas, as they are discussed below, appear to be
relatively uncontroversial and a matter of common knowledge and assent,
let it not be forgotten that that very knowledge and assent is in some
measure due to the work and efforts of Montagu, and that he was also
forcefully expounding those ideas at an earlier time, when they were
far from accepted, and indeed being brutally violated on a scale
unparallelled in human history (Montagu 1939; 1941a).

Montagu's papers on race in the late 1930s, culminating in his book
"Man's Most Dangerous Myth; The Fallacy of Race" (1942a) and followed
by a series of works (including Montagu 1951; 1964; 1975), had the
effect of upsetting the traditional concept of race accepted by most
anthropologists in that it challenged the reality of anything
corresponding to that notion. Montagu emphasized that gene-frequency
analysis of traits would tell us more about the evolution of human
populations, arguing that the omelet conception of racial mixing was
totally artificial and did nothing to explain the origins and
consequences of the differences between populations. Since men were all
originally gatherer-hunters, wherever they were, the environmental
challenges faced by different populations tended to be very similar;
hence, one would not expect mental differences. This theory, as set
forth in an article coauthored with the geneticist Theodosius
Dobzhansky (1947), subsequently became generally accepted by
anthropologists. Montagu was also asked to draw up the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations Statement on Race
(1951) in 1950.

In addition to his work on race, Montagu was among the first to present
a number of views, since widely accepted, on such familiar social and
psychological themes as aggression and war (1946b; 1976), social
factors in crime (Montagu & Merton 1940), women's rights (1953b),
psychoanalysis and psychiatry in anthropology (194 1b), love (1953a),
home birth and prenatal care (1950; 1962), AfroAmerican studies (1944),
sociobiology (1940), birth order (1948), privacy (1956a), and even
smoking (19421) and natural foods (1958). In these and other works
Montagu was always a strong advocate of gene-environment interactionism
(1926; 1940; 1956b; 1959; 1962), stressing that heredity is not
biologically given in the genes, and that man's constitution is a
dynamic process arising out of the interaction between his unique
experiential history and the constraints and potential encoded in his
genetic material.

This interactionist stance allowed Montagu to be an effective exponent
of the often polarized realms of cultural and biological anthropology.
He could adduce evidence on behalf of the biosocial nature of man
(1956b) while at the same time showing the virtually limitless capacity
of education and culture to shape that very nature (1962). His
interactionism attempted to reconcile these two poles, not only in
terms of the history of the dual influences acting during one man's
lifetime, but also those in mankind's evolutionary history. Montagu
emphasized social cooperation and love (1953a; 1974) as critical
selectional factors in evolution -- ideas that considerably predated
the sociobiological preoccupation with altruism (in the new inclusive
fitness sense) in the late 1970s.

Other works by Montagu had fewer social repercussions, but still
represented important contributions to anthropology. "Coming Into Being
Among the Australian Aborigines" (1937) is one of the classic works on
this subject and continues to be a useful source, treating such topics
as awareness of the facts of maternity and paternity and the
significance of ritual sexual mutilation. This was not only a pioneer
study which served to stimulate many students and research workers, but
its approach systematized a field which, aside from Bronislaw
Malinowski's Sexual Life of Savages (1929), had been only vaguely and
poorly understood previously. In addition, Montagu's work on the
adolescent sterility period (1946a) solved a perplexing problem
encountered by many anthropologists -- most notably by Malinowski in
his studies on the Trobrianders (1929) -- that although adolescent
girls engaged in extensive premarital sexual relations, they rarely
became pregnant.

Montagu also worked on technical problems in anthropometry. He
established certain craniometric reference points on the scalp and
devised measuring instruments to determine homologous points on the
underlying skull in living subjects (1960). His anatomical work on
nonhuman primates and on fossils culminated in the publication of one
of the earliest textbooks of physical anthropology (1945), which
continued for a long time to be a widely used and authoritative work on
the subject. Montagu's other texts include reference works on heredity
(1959) and anatomy and physiology (Montagu's & Steen 1959), an
excellent biography of Edward Tyson (1943), and a large variety of
elegant and informative books written for the educated layman.

Montagu's doctorate in anthropology was conferred by Columbia
University in 1937. His early academic and intellectual background had
been as richly varied as his later contributions. After a long-standing
childhood interest in skulls, fossils, and medical matters, fostered by
encouragement from the anatomist - anthropologist Arthur Keith, of the
Royal College of Surgeons in London, Montagu enrolled at 17 years of
age at University College London, for a diplomate in psychology, with a
view to transferring to anthropology. Among his professors in
psychology were C. E. Spearman and the father of modern statistics and
biometrics, Karl Pearson; in anthropology he was taught by Elliot Smith
and C. G. Seligman. At that time in Europe the new anthropology was
just developing, with the functional school of Malinowski. The earlier
sticks/stones/bones approach was being replaced by an analysis of the
functional interrelations among the elements of culture. Montagu became
Malinowski's first student, and surely bears the latter's imprint
(along with an even stronger one, some feel, from his other great
teacher, Franz Boas); but he soon diverged in favor of a strong
biological orientation, particularly in matters pertaining to
psychology. (Montagu was one of the first exponents of Sigmund Freud in
anthropology, although he later became a critic of the psychoanalytic
approach.)

C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, feels
that "Montagu has done more than anyone except Margaret Mead to bring
the findings of anthropology to the attention of the public." Weston
LaBarre of Duke University describes him as "the most prolific and
effective popularizer of humanistic subjects since H. G. Wells." Not all
anthropologists take such a favorable view of popularization, however;
and this may have adversely affected Montagu's own intradisciplinary
popularity; yet more than one of his colleagues have suggested that
this negative attitude may well reflect sour grapes.

Popularization has not been the only factor diminishing Montagu's
professional popularity. According to Marcus Goldstein of Tel Aviv
University: "The reason for this, in my opinion, has been his
forthrightness, his fearless and blunt attack on works and issues that
he felt were scientifically wrong, and perhaps more important, were or
could be socially harmful. Two examples come to mind. At one of the
early meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists,
he sharply criticized Prof. E. A. Hooton's work on a typology of U.S.
criminals, a virtual return to Lombrosoism. One must remember in this
connection that Hooton was the revered teacher of nearly all of the
young physical anthropologists of the day! In a subsequent paper
co-authored with Robert Merton (Crime and the anthropologist," 1940),
Hooton's premises and methodology were systematically demonstrated to
be invalid. At another meeting of the Association, Montagu proposed a
motion to censure the German anthropologists who were patently misusing
the discipline to conform with the vicious Nazi ideology. The motion
was defeated, yet the following year the very man instrumental for its
defeat proposed the same motion, which passed unanimously."

The final arbiter as to the value of popularization will of course have
to be history. Whether in the mid- to later part of the twentieth
century, with its unprecedently well-educated and well-informed
general population and its pervasive and powerful communications media
it was still possible for scientists, particularly social scientists,
to pursue their research, particularly on socially sensitive or
otherwise significant topics, without simultaneously assuming an
advocates, or at least an exegete's role vis-a-vis the educated
populace, is an empirical question that only the actual turn of events
can answer. In any case, it is clear that Ashley Montagu cast his lot
with the new dual role of the social scientist, and fulfilled both
aspects of it admirably.